360 Red Ringed AGAIN!!

[Jobydrone]

Well, my third Xbox 360 has fallen victim to the "Red Ring of Death" and I went out to replace it over the weekend.  I am now the owner of one of the new 250GB Xbox 360 "slim" models.  I'm not going to go into how much of a sucker I feel like for continuing to shell out money to this giant, faceless corporation that has gotten me hooked on these games.  Just leave it that I have a problem.  I'm an addict, and I realize it.  There's worse things I could be addicted to and I have the full support of my family who loves me anyway ;)

I am super, ridiculously P.O.'d because I accidently lost all my saved games during the transfer process.  All those hours spent in Skyrim?  Gone.  I am most angry about my two Mass Effect saves.  I was really looking forward to Mass Effect 3 using my same character.  Can't believe that's not going to happen now.  So upset...

[QuadShot]

Joby, this may be a silly question, but how did you lose everything? Aren't the hard drives interchangeable? I really don't know as I dont' have one of the new XBox's.  But I can empathize...I've had two go bad on me, not the red-ring but for some reason, the read-eye won't always work. Have to tap on the top while the game is loading in order to get it to read the game.

[X]

Well, my third Xbox 360 has fallen victim to the "Red Ring of Death" and I went out to replace it over the weekend.  I am now the owner of one of the new 250GB Xbox 360 "slim" models.  I'm not going to go into how much of a sucker I feel like for continuing to shell out money to this giant, faceless corporation that has gotten me hooked on these games.  Just leave it that I have a problem.  I'm an addict, and I realize it.  There's worse things I could be addicted to and I have the full support of my family who loves me anyway ;)

I am super, ridiculously P.O.'d because I accidently lost all my saved games during the transfer process.  All those hours spent in Skyrim?  Gone.  I am most angry about my two Mass Effect saves.  I was really looking forward to Mass Effect 3 using my same character.  Can't believe that's not going to happen now.  So upset...

I put all of my good saves on my cloud saves. I don't know why, but I still haven't had any problems with my xbox.

[billybob476]

The hard drives between the 'old' and 'new' hard drives are not easily interchangeable, no.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

The hard drives between the 'old' and 'new' hard drives are not easily interchangeable, no.

Really?  Dang, I thought they were.  o_O.  That's kinda lame.

King

[billybob476]

The hard drives between the 'old' and 'new' hard drives are not easily interchangeable, no.

Really?  Dang, I thought they were.  o_O.  That's kinda lame.

King

Guess they didn't want people with existing 20 or 120 GB models buying the low end 'new' 360 and putting in their old drives. They want you to buy the 250 GB model.

[QuadShot]

The hard drives between the 'old' and 'new' hard drives are not easily interchangeable, no.

Thank you Mr. Gates! :) Figures doesn't it.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

The hard drives between the 'old' and 'new' hard drives are not easily interchangeable, no.

Thank you Mr. Gates! :) Figures doesn't it.

lol no, its that new guy: Mr. Gates version 0.5.  ;)

King

[Jobydrone]

Joby, this may be a silly question, but how did you lose everything? Aren't the hard drives interchangeable? I really don't know as I dont' have one of the new XBox's.  But I can empathize...I've had two go bad on me, not the red-ring but for some reason, the read-eye won't always work. Have to tap on the top while the game is loading in order to get it to read the game.

It's kind of a long story, but this is what happened:

I first bought an official refurbished model from Microsoft.  The above posts are right, you cannot use your old hard drive with the new systems.  There's a proprietary transfer cable you have to use to transfer everything from the old drive to the new.  So I bought the cable, did the transfer, and a few hours after using the refurbed model I heard a horrible scraping scratching sound coming from the disc drive whenever the Xbox was in horizontal orientation.  If I stood it vertical it sounded fine, but with the kids around I like it flat and anyway I wasn't going to pay $200 bucks for a system that is malfunctioning out of the box.  So I returned the refurb and paid the $50 more to just get a new one.  What I didn't realize was that when I transferred my data, it wasn't a copy/paste, it was a cut/paste.  My old drive was empty.  I called the Gamestop to see if I could salvage my data but they had already wiped the unit.  bye bye save games...:(

[X]

The design of the units is what creates the incompatibility. On the old units, they rested on the top of the xbox and in the new ones, they are internal in a different direction. It has everything to do with the slim design and not trying to trick you into a larger drive. Hell, they just gave away the cloud save storage so that you need less hard drive space.

[Jobydrone]

Well the new "Slim" is far superior to the old model, for sure.  It is whisper silent, while my old 360 sounded like a jet plane taking off even if I had a game installed.  They've also supposedly fixed the seat for the motherboard and the issues that were causing the device to overheat and red ring.  That remains to be seen.  I'm a bit annoyed that I had to pay pretty much full price for a device at the very near end of its life cycle.  I do like having 250GB of storage, rather than the 20GB I had before (and paid 100 bucks for in 2007.) 

What really annoys me is before, I was able to get a very low priced model to replace the broken one with no memory, no wifi, and use my accessories that I had already purchased in the new system.  Now that is not an option.  My Wifi adapter is useless, (the device has internal wifi built in now) as is my memory unit.

[QuadShot]

The design of the units is what creates the incompatibility. On the old units, they rested on the top of the xbox and in the new ones, they are internal in a different direction. It has everything to do with the slim design and not trying to trick you into a larger drive. Hell, they just gave away the cloud save storage so that you need less hard drive space.

X, I've been using the cloud too now and it's been ok.

[ChrisMC]

I'm on my 4th X-Box, and after 3 "repairs",  this one has been better than the others, no freezing or anything. I think I've had it for 2 years. It's crazy how this sort of hardware failure on a high ticket item (I bought mine in the1st wave for 400) is so common. I hope they are being more careful with the next version.

[Jobydrone]

They're only offering cloud saves to Gold members...$50.00 a year if you pay all at once.  They aren't "giving it away."

[Jobydrone]

I'm on my 4th X-Box, and after 3 "repairs",  this one has been better than the others, no freezing or anything. I think I've had it for 2 years. It's crazy how this sort of hardware failure on a high ticket item (I bought mine in the1st wave for 400) is so common. I hope they are being more careful with the next version.

Agreed, it's totally ridiculous.  Also that they charge $100 for out of warranty repairs even though this is a known hardware defect.  In any case, I could have repaired it and instead chose to get a new one.  My choice, not forced.  Of course, my experience with their repair process back when my first Xbox failed, and having them send me three broken units under the guise of "refurbed models"  soured me on their repair program.  Now I see from my experience with my latest refurbished Xbox described above that they have not changed their policy of poor quality control and testing for their refurbished hardware.  Pretty pathetic really, for such a rich company to have such low quality standards.